The stars and supporting cast on the pub-style stage
When youenter New York Theatre Workshop’s space on E. 4th St. to see Once, the musical adaptation of the 2007Irish indiefilm (see my 2007 blog post on the film), the well-worn theatre suddenly feels like a party hall. The stage has been transformed into a bar,replete with distressed old mirrors and sconce lights, and a low counter thatserves double-duty as a place for spectators to get a pint before the playproper starts and as a secondary acting platform for the considerable talentsof this musically distinguished and emotionally empathetic cast.
In Irishplaywright Enda Walsh’s faithful adaptation, the Dublincommunity onwhich the story focuses is bound by its music making. The cast is small by musical theatrestandards, since the "community here," usually represented by dozens ofsupernumeraries, is the close-knit one of Dublin street buskers and musicianswho remain soulfully devoted to music as an expression of their pining spirits.
Steve Kazee plays “the guy,” a recentlyjilted, emotionally and artistically ambivalent singer/song-writer who at the show’sbeginning, after a wrenching solo, has decided to abandon his battered guitar on the street as a kind of remnant of his own lost soul.
But “the girl”(like “the guy,” also nameless, an odd conceit borrowed from the film)overhears his ballad and brings him emphatically back to his music and to hislife. Played by the lovely, energetic CristinMilioti (last seen at NYTW in Ivo Van Hove’s Little Foxes), she drags him to a music store where she borrows apiano on which to accompany him in her resonant, equally soulful style. Through sheer will and a bit of artfully withheldromance, she encourages him to resume his music-making in America, where he canreconnect with his departed girlfriend and have a wonderful life.
As in thefilm, music expresses the duo's personalities and their yearnings. The musical's loveliest and most hauntingnumber remains the Academy Award-winning “Falling Slowly,” written andperformed by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, the original guy and girl whoremain credited for the music and lyrics of this adaptation. The ballad grows as a duet between the two,whose voices blend perfectly as their separate instruments play a kind ofsyncopated, already sad flirtation.
Walshmanufactures some humorous initial conflict between Billy (Paul Whitty), themusic store owner, and the bank manager (Andy Taylor) to whom the girl and guyturn for a loan to make their album. When the banker turns out to be a closeted musician (and anot-so-closeted gay man), he gives the couple the money and joins the band,overcoming Billy’s suspicion of capitalists to become part of the singing andplaying ensemble.
In fact, thatband of sympathetic brothers and sisters is one of the sweetest things aboutthis very sweet show. Director JohnTiffany (Black Watch) keeps hisinstrument-playing and singing cast on stage throughout Once, John Doyle-style. Heguides them toward saloon-style chairs that line the wide proscenium stage inbetween numbers. From there, they watchthe action intently and provide the occasional musical punctuation orundertone.
The severalacoustic guitars, an electric bass, a banjo, an accordion, a ukulele, a bass,and two violins, as well as a drum set employed in the climactic studiorecording scene, compose the orchestra, all played by members of the cast. The mournful ballads underscore the fatedlove story, and the musicians provide pre-show and intermission Irish pub musicto persuade the audience into the Dublin world of Once.
And theaudience loves it. They approach the baron stage willingly before the show and during the intermission, where cast andcrew pull pints of Guinness and other beers. Several spectators the night I attended danced with the musicians who sangtogether center stage, stomping their feet Riverdance-style and making thatparticularly Irish sort of merry before the central story got underway.
The pre-showparty is a fun theatrical choice, shaking up, as it does, the conventionalseparation between performer and spectator. The choice to create a pub-style environment that lets the show be smalland intimate, signals from the start that Onceis not aspiring to more typical musical spectacle that would mock the more personal commitments at the film’s heart.
He’s grudgingat first, floundering on the shoals of lost love and confusion about his ownambitions. But she’s insistent. In the first act, in fact, she’s a bit toosingle-minded in her intention to repair his heart, and appears the stereotypicalgirl in the service of a guy’s future rather than her own.
But Walshgives the character more nuances in the second act. She has a child and a husband who’s on hisway back to Dublin from a trial separation. And although she’s drawn to the guy, she has a stalwart ethic thatrequires her to try to make her marriage work. That the guy and the girl clearly love one another but don’t becomelovers is a refreshing tactic for a musical. Their attraction shimmers around the show, and their sad but somehowright failure to consummate their love makes Once wistful and somehow true about those complicated affairs ofthe heart.
Bob Crowley’sevocative set and costumes are lit beautifully by Natasha Katz, who gilds theactors with the kind of romantic, introspective warmth that seems to deepen theiremotional complexity. Many of the show’sscenes take place in squares of light that mark off the space, carving it intointimate encounters between pairs of characters--the guy and his father; theguy and the girl; Billy and his date. Once, as a result, is an intimate,surprisingly quiet affair, in which between the numbers, the characters spendtime simply talking to one another about their desires, hopes, and dreams.
The Czechbackground of the girl and her extended family—her mother, daughter, andcousins figure heavily into her Dublin life—is played for laughs. The cousins, of all the musical’s characters,are cardboard stereotypes meant to elicit the national confusions and languagehumor that comes from immigrants navigating new worlds.
Walsh andTiffany handle the film’s international flair with supertitles which, in acreative twist, project the English dialogue into the characters’ nativetongues. That is, the audience sees thegirl’s exchanges with her family projected in Czech, and some of the Dubliner’sdialogue projected in Irish. The actorsspeak in English with various degrees of Eastern European and Irish accents, noneof which are pronounced enough to get in the way of comprehension.
The show’s choreographyis light and unobtrusive, but occasionally inspired, as when the girl and theguy, in separate images, seem to sculpt the air with their arms, providing circlesof warmth and intimacy into which one of the other performers walks. For instance, the girl, downstage center,curves her arm out in front of her, and one of the other women moves into herembrace, leaning her back into the girl’s chest and circling her arm around herwaist so that the girl can lay her chin on the other woman’s shoulder.
In anotherlight but poignant dance moment, when the girl listens to the guy’s music on apair of large headphones, the two other young women in the cast (both of whomplay the violin) mirror her as she moves about the stage, their handsoutstretched into the air with the exhilaration of listening to sounds you love.
Once isa charming production, currently selling out at NYTW and poised to move to Broadwayin February. The show’s investorspremiered the production at Diana Paulus’s American Repertory Theatre in Cambridgebefore the move to NYTW; they apparently have always planned on a Broadway run.
When the showmoves to the Bernard Jacobs Theatre, I only hope it finds a way to retain theintimacy of its appeal for a larger audience. It would be a shame to sacrifice the pub-like atmosphere of the theatre,and the quiet simplicity of the acting and the singing, or to make the show whollybigger for a Broadway crowd.
The appeal ofOnce comes from the appropriate scale of its ambitions—to tell a story through lovely ballads,sung from broken, yearning young hearts.
The FeministSpectator
Once,New York Theatre Workshop, December 16, 2011.
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